ICT news

• Blizzard Will Suspend World of Warcraft In China Because of Licensing Dispute

  23-01-2023 23:47 via games.slashdot.org
  
  Blizzard will suspend games in China because it can't reach an agreement with its licensing and publishing partner NetEase, it said in a press release. World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, Overwatch 2, Starcraft, Heroes of the Storm, Diablo III, and Warcraft III: Reforged won't be available in China after January 23, 2023. The Verge reports: Blizzard will suspend the sale of games and offer guidance to Chinese players "in the coming days," according to the press release, which did not offer a specifi
  
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• Tens of Millions Without Power In Pakistan As National Grid Fails

  23-01-2023 23:12 via hardware.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Pakistan's national grid suffered a major breakdown, leaving millions of people without electricity for the second time in three months and highlighting the infrastructural weakness of the heavily indebted nation. The energy minister, Khurram Dastgir, said the outage on Monday was caused by a large voltage surge in the south of the grid, which affected the entire network. Supplies were being partially restored from north to the south, he add
  
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• Google's Pichai Tells Staff Cuts Avoided 'Much Worse' Problems

  23-01-2023 22:20 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Google's chief executive officer told employees that cuts were made in a bid to act decisively as the company's growth slowed. From a report: In an internal meeting, Sundar Pichai, who is CEO of Google parent Alphabet, said he had consulted with the company's founders and board in making the decision for 6% cuts, according to remarks reviewed by Bloomberg. "If you don't act clearly and decisively and early, we can compound the problem and make it much worse," Pichai said. "These are decisions I
  
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• iOS 16.3 and macOS Ventura 13.2 Add Hardware Security Key Support

  23-01-2023 21:40 via apple.slashdot.org
  
  Apple released iOS and iPadOS 16.3, macOS Ventura 13.2, and watchOS 9.3 today. The updates focus primarily on bug fixes and under-the-hood improvements, but there is one notable addition: Apple ID got support for hardware security keys. From a report: Once they've updated to the new software, a user can opt to make a device like a YubiKey a required part of the two-factor authentication process for their account. It's unlikely most users will take advantage of this, of course, but for a select f
  
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• Amazon and Stripe Expand Partnership

  23-01-2023 21:00 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Amazon and Stripe have signed an agreement that will see the two companies increase their use of each others' services, the companies said. Amazon plans to increase its use of Stripe's payments processing services, whereas Stripe will expand its use of Amazon Web Services.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
  
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• The Strange and Awful Path of Productivity in the US Construction Sector

  23-01-2023 20:20 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Despite aggregate productivity for the US economy having doubled over the past 50 years, the country's construction sector has diverged considerably, trending downward throughout that period. And this is no slight decrease. Raw BEA data suggest that the value added per worker in the construction sector was about 40 percent lower in 2020 than in 1970. From a report: How can a sector like construction, with average value-added of 4.3 percent of GDP between 1950 and 2020, experience such a precipit
  
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• Earth's Inner Core May Have Started Spinning Other Way

  23-01-2023 19:40 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Far below our feet, a giant may have started moving against us. From a report: Earth's inner core, a hot iron ball the size of Pluto, has stopped spinning in the same direction as the rest of the planet and might even be rotating the other way, research suggested on Monday. Roughly 5,000 kilometres (3,100 miles) below the surface we live on, this "planet within the planet" can spin independently because it floats in the liquid metal outer core. Exactly how the inner core rotates has been a matte
  
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• Scores of Stanford Students Used ChatGPT on Final Exams, Survey Suggests

  23-01-2023 19:00 via news.slashdot.org
  
  The Stanford Daily: Stanford students and professors alike are grappling with the rise of ChatGPT, a chatbot powered by artificial intelligence, and the technology's implications for education. Some professors have already overhauled their courses in anticipation of how students might use the chatbot to complete assignments and exams. And according to an informal poll conducted by The Daily, a large number of students have already used ChatGPT on their final exams.
  Whether the new technology wil
  
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• Banks Plan Payment Wallet To Compete With PayPal, Apple Pay

  23-01-2023 18:20 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Big banks are teaming up to launch a digital wallet that people can use to shop online. Wells Fargo, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and four other banks are working on a new product that will allow shoppers to pay at merchants' online checkout with a wallet that will be linked to their debit and credit cards. From a report: The digital wallet will be managed by Early Warning Services, the bank-owned company that operates money-transfer service Zelle. The wallet, which doesn't have a name yet, w
  
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• ChatGPT Users Report $42 a Month Pricing for 'Pro' Access But No Official Word Yet

  23-01-2023 17:40 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  An anonymous reader shares a report: Earlier this month, OpenAI said it was exploring ways to monetize its AI chatbot ChatGPT, giving users the opportunity to sign up for early access to "ChatGPT Professional." Now, some users say they've been granted access to a pro tier which costs $42 a month. OpenAI hasn't confirmed this is an official test or made any announcements. As OpenAI said earlier this month: "Please keep in mind that this is an early experimental program that is subject to change,
  
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• New York's Financial Regulator Takes Aim at Firms Co-Mingling Crypto Funds

  23-01-2023 17:02 via news.slashdot.org
  
  New York's chief financial regulator is set to release new guidance on Monday dictating that companies separate customers' crypto assets from their own, after alleged co-mingling of funds at collapsed crypto exchange FTX and its affiliated trading firm Alameda Research led to hefty losses for clients. From a report: The New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS), which leads one of the few state agencies with a regulatory system in place for cryptocurrency companies, will also stipu
  
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• Spotify To Trim 6% of Workforce in Latest Tech Layoffs

  23-01-2023 16:21 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Spotify said on Monday it plans to cut 6% of its workforce and would take a related charge of up to nearly $50 million, adding to the massive layoffs in the technology sector in preparation for a possible recession. From a report: The tech industry is facing a demand downturn after two years of pandemic-powered growth during which it had hired aggressively. That has led firms from Meta to Microsoft to shed thousands of jobs. "Over the last few months we've made a considerable effort to rein in c
  
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• Microsoft Makes Multibillion-Dollar Investment in OpenAI

  23-01-2023 15:15 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Microsoft is making a multibilllion-dollar investment in OpenAI, the pioneering artificial intelligence research lab behind ChatGPT and DALL-E, as the software giant looks to more closely tie these text and image-generating programs to its offerings. From a report: The news comes less than a week after the company said it's laying off 10,000 workers as a weakening economy crimps software demand. Microsoft noted in that announcement that it will still invest and hire in key priority areas. The so
  
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• Citadel Breaks Records With $16 Billion Profit

  23-01-2023 15:02 via news.slashdot.org
  
  Ken Griffin's Citadel made $16bn profit for investors last year, the biggest dollar gain by a hedge fund in history and a haul that establishes his company as the most successful of all time. Financial Times: Citadel, which manages $54bn in assets, made a 38.1 per cent return in its main hedge fund and strong gains in other products last year, equating to a record $16bn profit for investors after fees, according to research by LCH Investments, run by Edmond de Rothschild. The profit, which was d
  
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• Mars Helicopter 'Ingenuity' Completes Its 40th Flight on Mars

  23-01-2023 13:34 via science.slashdot.org
  
  "NASA's tiny Ingenuity helicopter now has 40 off-Earth flights under its belt," reports Space.com:The 4-pound (1.8 kilograms) Ingenuity lifted off yet again on Thursday (Jan. 19), staying aloft for nearly 92 seconds on a sortie that covered about 584 feet (178 meters) of horizontal distance. The flight repositioned Ingenuity, moving it from "Airfield Z" on the floor of Mars' Jezero Crater to "Airfield Beta," according to the mission's flight log. That journey took the little chopper over some sa
  
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• 83% of GNOME Users Installed Extensions, Survey Shows

  23-01-2023 09:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  
  Last summer GNOME invited people to voluntarily run the tool gnome-info-collect on their systems to send back (non-sensitive/non-identifiable) data about their system configurations. 2,560 people ran the tool, and they're now releasing the data.
  Here's the distribution of distros for all 2,560 respondents:Fedora: 1,376 (54.69%)
  Arch: 469 (18.64%)
  Ubuntu: 267 (10.61%)
  Manjaro: 140 (5.56%)
  EndeavourOS: 66 (2.62%)
  Debian: 44 (1.75%)
  openSUSE: 38 (1.51%)
  Pop! 38 (1.51%)
  Other: 78 (3.10%)
  And the bre
  
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• 925,000 Norton LifeLock Accounts Targeted by Credential-Stuffing Attack

  23-01-2023 05:56 via it.slashdot.org
  
  "Thousands of people who use Norton password manager began receiving emailed notices this month alerting them that an unauthorized party may have gained access to their personal information," reports CNET, "along with the passwords they have stored in their vaults.
  "Gen Digital, Norton's parent company, said the security incident was the result of a credential-stuffing attack rather than an actual breach of the company's internal systems."Gen's portfolio of cybersecurity services has a combined
  
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• What Happens When an AI Generates Designs for PC Cases?

  23-01-2023 02:36 via idle.slashdot.org
  
  Someone on Reddit used the Midjourney AI image generator to create "a selection of 28 fantastically alluring case designs" for the Mini ITX PC, reports Tom's Hardware:Our sample gallery of the AI-generated Mini ITX PCs embedded above features quite a few designs that are rather rotund. This isn't a bias of the AI; instead, Hybective admits he has a fondness for Wheatley (the AI robot from the Portal franchise) and has wanted a spherical PC ever since casting eyes on the Games Sphere (a GameCube
  
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• Extensions are Easily Impersonated in Microsoft's VSCode Marketplace, Researchers Say

  23-01-2023 01:26 via developers.slashdot.org
  
  74.48% of developers use Microsoft's Visual Studio Code, according to one survey conducted by StackOverflow. And besides GitHub Copilot, there's over 40,000 other extensions in the VSCode Marketplace.
  Unfortunately, InfoWorld reports, "Researchers at Aqua Nautilus say they have found that attackers could easily impersonate popular extensions and trick unknowing developers into downloading them."
  It can be challenging to distinguish between malicious and benign extensions, and the lack of sandbox
  
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